Inspiration from Mistakes
Artistic inspiration is frequently inspired by mistakes; images and sounds made mysterious and abstract by a disorientation from their usual and fully focused context.
I see images on book and magazine covers that are at a distance from me, slightly askewed, and obscured by distance and shadow. The images look impossibly bizarre, and hint at a fantastic geometry that comes to life in my mind. Animated faces with staring eyes and snarling lips leap off the page; surrealist shapes and patterns, backed by the depth of the void, suggest grandeur and infinite mystery.
'If only I could paint!' I think to myself. 'I should at least draw it. What the hell am I looking at?' At that point I get up and go over to look at the image as it actually is on the book or magazine cover, and it becomes instantly flat, mundane, uninspired.
'Oh, is that all?' I think.
A profound symbol was nothing more than a collage of people speaking at a podium. The Creature from the Black Lagoon face was a seafood platter ad from Long John Silver's. The rainbow vortex into another dimension was just a circular graph showing how many approved or disapproved of Dubbya's latest performance in pie slices. Whoopdy - shit!
The unfocused, out of context, barely glimpsed edges of reality are doorways to one's own mind, which steps in to creatively fill in the gaps.
The same thing occurs with sound and music. An entire song or symphony can be conjured out of a fleeting noise that seems to suggest more in the resonance than in the concrete moment. Often I have turned and caught some song in mid-flight; incredible odd time rhythm, I cant quite catch what it is doing; the arrangements are mind boggling in their complexity, and the whole thing is infused with the sound of eruptive genius....then Thud! it all falls into place as a very conventional rock / pop song I have heard many times. The whole impression of never-heard-before radical brilliance came from a mistake in perception. I still dont know how it happens to me, but suddenly catching something in the middle, my mind sometimes locks in to an upbeat that is actually a downbeat, and all the music around it sounds strange, new, and complex until I catch the context, and it all collapses into the well worn and normal.
Erroneous context, shifted focus, mistaken perceptions, a lack of clarity for external stimuli at precise moments, - all feed the mind's artistic inspiration. Perhaps this is analogous to evolution, which builds upon errors. Where would we be if everything was precisely as we would have it? Where could we go from there?
- Werbinox
I see images on book and magazine covers that are at a distance from me, slightly askewed, and obscured by distance and shadow. The images look impossibly bizarre, and hint at a fantastic geometry that comes to life in my mind. Animated faces with staring eyes and snarling lips leap off the page; surrealist shapes and patterns, backed by the depth of the void, suggest grandeur and infinite mystery.
'If only I could paint!' I think to myself. 'I should at least draw it. What the hell am I looking at?' At that point I get up and go over to look at the image as it actually is on the book or magazine cover, and it becomes instantly flat, mundane, uninspired.
'Oh, is that all?' I think.
A profound symbol was nothing more than a collage of people speaking at a podium. The Creature from the Black Lagoon face was a seafood platter ad from Long John Silver's. The rainbow vortex into another dimension was just a circular graph showing how many approved or disapproved of Dubbya's latest performance in pie slices. Whoopdy - shit!
The unfocused, out of context, barely glimpsed edges of reality are doorways to one's own mind, which steps in to creatively fill in the gaps.
The same thing occurs with sound and music. An entire song or symphony can be conjured out of a fleeting noise that seems to suggest more in the resonance than in the concrete moment. Often I have turned and caught some song in mid-flight; incredible odd time rhythm, I cant quite catch what it is doing; the arrangements are mind boggling in their complexity, and the whole thing is infused with the sound of eruptive genius....then Thud! it all falls into place as a very conventional rock / pop song I have heard many times. The whole impression of never-heard-before radical brilliance came from a mistake in perception. I still dont know how it happens to me, but suddenly catching something in the middle, my mind sometimes locks in to an upbeat that is actually a downbeat, and all the music around it sounds strange, new, and complex until I catch the context, and it all collapses into the well worn and normal.
Erroneous context, shifted focus, mistaken perceptions, a lack of clarity for external stimuli at precise moments, - all feed the mind's artistic inspiration. Perhaps this is analogous to evolution, which builds upon errors. Where would we be if everything was precisely as we would have it? Where could we go from there?
- Werbinox
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